An efficient procurement business process can effectively cut purchasing costs and lead to better purchasing terms and contracts from vendors. A recent study by Ernst and Young concluded that efficient contracts, over time, could reduce waste within a supply chain, generating savings of up to 15% of total contract spend with better contract management.

Most of the key business data within procurement lies in negotiated price contracts and service agreement with vendors.

However, adherence to these negotiated terms tends to slip and the company loses out on a number of savings opportunities. Therefore, easy access to past contracts is imperative for efficient future negotiations.

The fundamental challenge with managing data within contracts is that the data is usually in an unstructured form, and needs to be organized in a defined way, such as converting it into a database or using a reporting/BI tool. Traditional contract management systems such as CLM can help manage the entire contract lifecycle, but these systems struggle with identifying the specific data points within the contracts. Data points including delivery terms, payment terms, price, contract terms and service levels are crucial to business and procurement decision making.

How Counselytics Can Help

The future of an efficient supply chain is taking unstructured text and turning it into structured data, and then managing all of this data in one location to increase productivity. A solution such as Counselytics can assist in this process by extracting the most relevant data to consider while making the decisions of forecasting future costs, cutting unnecessary costs, and any unexpected costs in the supply chain:

– Counselytics takes this structured information and creates specific outcomes that highlight new understandings within the data.
– Procurement is enhanced when data is transformed into meaningful insights.
– People are better than machines at interpreting this data, but machines make it easy to understand this data, which allows for faster decision-making.
– Since procurement is a vital part of a business, fast decision-making is necessary to cut costs.

Companies are moving towards contract management analytics in order to easily understand and interpret historical data points. They can use these analyses to immediately access any contract information, providing for comparisons, potential risks, and future performance estimates within the supply chain.

Adopting our technological solution early is important for two reasons. First, the volume of historical contracts and unstructured content is increasing rapidly – by some estimates doubling every 90 days. Failure to tackle this problem sooner rather than later will only increase complexity, time delays and costs when the inevitable arrives. Second, our technology is built on a machine-learning platform that improves with use. By deploying our solution now, companies will experience an early-movers advantage in terms of refining analytical algorithms and extraction policies.

Counselytics overcomes challenges in the supply chain by providing for easy management of information held within contracts. Having a document’s information immediately accessible saves time and highlights new insights or opportunities. Contract management with Counselytics provides a faster, cheaper, and easier way to make important procurement decisions.

To learn more, contact your Counselytics team today at [email protected] or via telephone at 1-800-266-1472.

The adoption of artificial intelligence technology has been relatively slow compared to the ambition portrayed in media publications and journals. Companies are slow to incorporate this technology in the workplace citing complex decision-making and one-off scenarios as the need for humans to perform relatively rote tasks instead of machines. However, consistently missed from the analysis is that AI-like technology can help humans perform repetitive tasks much more quickly and greatly improve the quality of output. A good way to assess how impactful this technology could be is by looking at recent macro economic and macro political events and how technology could be deployed in those scenarios:

1) The Last Financial Crisis

During the 2008 Financial crisis when market liquidity dried up, banks and financial institutions undertook a massive effort to identify credit agreements that had been tripped based on the covenants associated. This was an intensive exercise including analysts and legal teams reading through largely similarly worded documents to identify and map the covenants associated. A solution such as Counselytics, which can extract and structure the covenants associated with each agreement and is able to analyze thousands of documents in a single day at a fraction of the cost, could have proved immensely beneficial.

2) FBI Email Scandal during the 2016 Election

Recently, the 2016 election was given a late twist due torevelations of new classified emails associated with the Democratic Party candidate, Hillary Clinton. A serious allegation so close to Election Day brought intense media and political pressure to present an outcome of the investigation prior to Election Day. A large team spent long hours going through the discovered emails and analyzing if any wrongdoing had occurred. Such a task, again, represents a great use case for the adoption of technology – an artificial intelligence solution using NLP (Natural Language Processing) could be trained to flag outliers and drastically reduce the amount of manual analysis that comes with evaluating large amounts of written text. The deployment of such a technology could have greatly reduced the workload associated with such an investigation and a multiple week national controversy may have been avoided.

3) EU Antitrust Regulations Investigations

For the past few months,the EU has embarked on an antitrust regulation campaigntargeting the likes of Google and Volvo for violating anti trust laws in Europe based on their product and marketing practices. This situation presents another example of how the deployment of cognitive augmentation technology could greatly benefit the team by flagging violated regulations across the products/services being investigated.

Counselytics brings the power of machine learning and artificial intelligence to the universe of enterprise documents and content. Roughly 96% of the world’s digital information is unindexed and unstructured. Large companies and other organizations create and maintain a significant portion of that information without any efficient way to access it, understand it or use it; exacerbating this problem, those entities are now doubling their digital payload every 90 days. The result is mismanaged risks, missed P&L opportunities and other costs.

The best procurement strategies are designed to work quickly, accurately, and efficiently. But despite all preparations, errors can still occur and have a very negative effect on a company’s procurement ability and cost. Listed below are the procurement challenges that we believe you may face.

Challenges:

Increased Costs – Acquisitions can pose a financial risk if all new costs are not accounted for.

Contract Inefficiency – Requests for intel from your contracts may take several weeks to complete.

Increased Legal Risk – A member of a company’s sales team was making a habit of signing for both parties in the organization’s supplier contracts.

Unknown Risk – Mergers and acquisitions can pose a risk if the liabilities contained in the new contracts are not know.

Counselytics can overcome these challenges by providing capabilities to easily manage the information held within contracts. Having a document’s information immediately accessible will save hours of time, and will help to prevent important liabilities from going unnoticed, creating a faster, more cost effective, and more reliable way to manage your contracts.